Thursday

Marblehead Health Department working with state officials to address the issue

Parents are expressing outrage and worry after learning that an organic garden at the Bell School has been contaminated with cleaning chemicals.

“There's no way anyone can think it's OK to take a dirty bucket of water with chemicals used to clean and dump it outside anywhere let alone near a children's organic garden,” Sage Chapin wrote on Facebook, where parents posted hundreds of heated messages about the contamination.

Marblehead Superintendent Maryann Perry sent an email Monday night to Bell School parents alerting them to the potential danger. Bell is an elementary school on Baldwin Road.

“It has been brought to our attention that the custodial staff has been discarding floor cleaning water next to and directly into the Organic Garden for several years against district protocol,” she wrote. “This water would have contained residue from floor cleaning operations including stripper, wax, neutralizer, and floor cleaner.”

The Marblehead School Department has hired a licensed site professional (LSP) to assist in collecting soil samples from the garden and interpreting soil analysis results, according to Andrew Petty, Marblehead’s public health director. Petty says the Health Department will work with the schools and with state departments of Environmental Protection and Public Health on this issue.

Signs posted at the garden warn people not to harvest the produce until further notice.

The Organic Garden has five main areas, including a raised planter section with six cedar boxes, according to a Bell PTO website page. Students work in the garden and eat its produce. The Organic Garden Committee declined comment about the contamination.

“Vegetables coming from the Upper Bell School garden lower beds have the potential to be contaminated with cleaning products,” Perry wrote. “The vegetables in the lower beds have been removed and discarded.

“If you have harvested any vegetables in the lower beds, the recommendation is to discard them,” she added in the email.

Several parents contacted the state Department of Environmental Protection with concerns. According to DEP spokesman Joe Ferson, the cleaning chemicals themselves were emptied down drains at the school, but the rinse water from empty floor cleaning machines and wet vacs was dumped in and near the garden.

Perry had not responded for comment at press time. In her Monday email she wrote, “We are sorry for this unfortunate lack of judgment on the custodial staff. We are truly grateful for all the work the Organic Committee, parents, and teachers have done to make the garden a highlight of Bell School. Please know we have taken steps to ensure this does not happen in the future.”

For many parents, the email didn’t calm their fears.

"What bothers me is that for years, this has been the practice," said Melissa Epstein, a Bell School parent.

Epstein said she had to sign a permission slip for her child, who will enter the second grade, to work in and sample from the organic garden, which in her mind meant it was safe.

Now she wonders how safe.

She was also a bit put off by the way parents were told of the situation. Epstein said she learned about the problem via an email sent to parents at 9 p.m. Monday evening simply slugged "organic garden."

Parents get emails regularly regarding the garden, she said.

"If this one hadn't gone to my husband's work email and he read it, I probably would have glazed right over it," she said.

Epstein said she plans to follow up with school officials and will walk by the garden "to check and make sure measures are being taken."

Other parents are even more upset.

“I’d say this is bordering on criminal,” Xhazzie Kindle wrote on Facebook. “The staff must have known children would be eating the produce!”

Gabrielle Stachera wrote, “MPS will be lucky if they don’t face a class action lawsuit over this...but I guess their ‘whoops, sorry we were poisoning your kids for YEARS’ email will make everything better.”